


A Cure for What Ails You

by narcolepticbadger



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Doctor/Patient, Fluff, Gen, Implied Maze/Linda, Maze/sharp objects, Mentions of Trixie and Lucifer, Minor Injuries, but Maze likes to flirt so read it as you will
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-02
Updated: 2017-12-02
Packaged: 2019-02-09 16:33:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12892050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/narcolepticbadger/pseuds/narcolepticbadger
Summary: “I told you the knife was a bad idea.”“And I told you to hold still.”Chloe gets a splinter, Maze tries to help, and bickering and bloodshed (predictably) ensue.





	A Cure for What Ails You

_It is a truth universally acknowledged that a woman on the verge of running late for her shift must also manage to lose her keys_ , Chloe thought, sighing, as she rummaged through the collection of dishes and papers on the kitchen counter yet again. She would swear that her keyring migrated of its own accord sometimes, but only _precisely_ when she needed it most.

That, or this was some new piece of mischief wrought by her daughter and Maze, another of the games they had invented in recent weeks that so often saw Trixie concealing herself behind curtains or in cabinets to practice the stealth and cunning a job like bounty hunting required. And Chloe had found it charming, really, to catch those two with their heads bent together, plotting out tactical maneuvers and grand cross-country adventures with militant seriousness, but it became considerably _less_ so when she became the unwitting target of their ‘missions.’

Another sweep of the counter unearthed nothing, but, in the haste of her frustration, Chloe managed to tip the edge of a glass enough to send it, teetering, to the precipice. Time slowed: she knew what was to come without actually seeing it happen, that paralyzing half-dread that anticipated impact before the fall had been fully set in motion, and her fingers skimmed through open air as she tried to right the tumbler again, her swing-and-a-miss then punctuated by the cacophony of its shattering against the floor.

She closed her eyes and gritted, as if through a mouthful of broken glass, “Freakin’ perfect.”

She did _not_ have time to deal with this, even in the most haphazard of ways, but the last thing she needed was for Trixie to come home and hurt herself in the mess. She knelt and began plucking up the biggest chunks of glass she could find, moving as carefully as her impatience would allow — and promptly cut herself instead.

“Ow, _fuck_!”

“Tsk tsk, _language_ , Decker,” Maze said from behind her, sidling into the kitchen with the trickster ease of a housecat and sounding altogether too pleased with herself, with her unerring knack for showing up just after some trouble (that she definitely, _probably_ had nothing to do with) had occurred.

In no mood to humor her, Chloe muttered a curt “Trixie isn’t here” and continued checking her palm for damages.

“No, but I am, and what will Lucifer say when he learns you’ve been corrupting my virgin ears?”

“Funny.”

“Just trying to lighten the mood,” Maze said with a shrug. “Need a hand there?”

“No, it’s fine,” Chloe groaned. It wasn’t, exactly, given she was now fairly sure she had managed to get at least one sliver of glass embedded in her hand, but she could worry about that later, after she got to the precinct and made sure she wouldn’t have to worry about the sting of unemployment first. “A little impalement never killed anyone, right?”

“Impalement?”

Chloe realized, almost immediately, that that had been just the wrong thing to snark, as Maze’s echoed question came with a dark look of interest, a twitch of the eyebrow that Chloe had long ago learned to mistrust. It was never a good thing when Maze perked up at the mere mention of violence.

“I was being dramatic. It’s _nothing_ , just a little sliver —”

A knife materialized in Maze’s hand (as they so often did), somehow pulled from the air in one seamless gesture. “Let me see.”

Chloe was tempted to make a crack about how Maze had clearly missed her calling as a magician, if only to stop her brain from freaking out about the disquieting turn the morning had just taken. She settled for a slightly weak, “I think amputation may be a little extreme in this case, Maze.”

The other woman rolled her eyes. “You have to take splinters out so they don’t get infected, idiot. Even _I_  know that.”

“Yeah, with a _tweezers_ or something that’s less… murder weapon-y.”

Of course, this was Maze she was talking too, the one person who could claim that she had once gutted a man with a toothpick and Chloe wouldn’t even think to question it. (The subtle _been-there-done-that_ cock of the bounty hunter’s head in response to her quip about murder weapons was telling enough as it was.)

“This is faster,” Maze said with absolute conviction, hefting her blade so that it caught the soft light filtering through the window as she continued to advance. Chloe edged backwards in answer, defensive instincts kicking in, and the whole scene was so ridiculously like something out of a (very low-budget) horror movie that she could almost hear a bubble of hysterical laughter rising in her throat.

Maze was eyeing her with a mix of annoyance and amusement. “Seriously, Decker, I’m not going to hurt you. It’ll just take a second and _bam_ — fixed, as good as new.”

“I really think a tweezers would be easier,” Chloe repeated, but she was rapidly losing ground. Maze had backed her into a corner (literally, her spine pressed into the opposite edge of the counter until she could go no further) and now calmly took Chloe’s hand in her own, her thumb running in soft, exploratory circles until she found the delicate ridge raised by the glass. “Or, you know, waiting and letting the thing work its way out on its own…”

“You’re worse than Trixie when she’s trying to get out of taking her cough medicine. And that stuff is rank, so I can at least understand her whole five-stages-of-grief thing.”

“I’m just concerned — justifiably, I think you’ll agree — about someone who can be a little,” Chloe hesitated over the phrasing, but neither she nor Maze had ever held much with pretense, “well, _stab-happy_ coming at me with a knife.”

Maze bared her teeth in a sharp smile, turning the designation into a compliment as only she could. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

“I don’t know, a tiny slip and suddenly I’m a few fingers short of a high-five?”

“Only if you don’t hold still.”

And with that Maze seemed to decide that the conversation was over, bringing the tip of the knife to Chloe’s palm and beginning to press gently along the wound, working to coax any remnants of glass free.

Which might have been fine, if Chloe hadn’t tried to jerk away, an irresistible flinch of reflex asserting itself without warning, at the same moment. “Maze, wait —”

She saw the bright red slick of blood spill over the join of their hands, vaguely heard Maze saying _oops_ with slightly more concern than usual, but she felt nothing besides the sudden, inescapable weight of gravity pressing down on her shoulders.

And then Chloe was falling, and falling, and waiting for the discordant note of her own shattering.

.

.

.

“You know, if you wanted my attention you didn’t have to go to such extremes.”

Chloe wasn’t sure how Maze had known she was waking — wasn’t sure she knew it yet herself, when it felt as though she were just now stepping back into her body after an untold absence, unsure of everything beyond the twin focal points of a distant pain near her wrist and the familiar, lightly-scornful cadence of Maze’s voice.

She forced her eyes open, scrunching her face against the influx of light and memory, and blinking, blinking, until she could make out the details of her surroundings: she was laid out flat on the sofa, a pillow tucked not-quite-right under her head and her legs lifted into Maze’s lap in a surprisingly… impressive approximation of basic first aid procedures.

Maze wasn’t even looking at her, hands busied with polishing the slender curve of her knife in adept, loving circles.

“I, uh, fainted?”

“Like a Victorian noblewoman who had just seen someone’s naughty bits for the very first time,” Maze said dryly, but there was something of a smirk playing about her lips that suggested she had found the whole incident deeply amusing.

Interrupting the rhythm of her cleansing ritual, she ran a finger down the full length of the blade and nodded once in satisfaction, pocketing the knife and finally turning her dark eyes to Chloe to fix her with a look that held a certain softness, and an equally curious hunger.

“I’ve been known to have that effect on women before, but I hadn’t pegged _you_ for the swooning type. Anything you want to confess, Decker?”

Maze’s question was playful, a teasing wink of a thing, but all the same her voice was suggestively low in a way that felt double-edged, like Chloe might cut herself against it if she drew too near. And it was enough to heat Chloe’s cheeks with more than her embarrassment over passing out over something as stupid as the shock of seeing her own blood.

Speaking of…

She lifted her hand to check the aftermath for herself and was met with a thick wad of gauze welded to her palm by a patchwork of dinosaur bandaids — at least seven of them that she could count, criss-crossing and doubled over and already half-unstuck along the crease of her thumb. She noticed now that the contents of Trixie’s little medical kit lay strewn across the coffee table (and, looking down, the floor) beside her, clearly having been raided for emergency supplies.

“I facetimed Linda, and she said you didn’t need stitches,” Maze told her, not bothering to hide her disappointment at that fact.

“Well, that’s something.” Chloe sighed, frowning at the slight stain coloring the center of the gauze. It didn’t _hurt_ , exactly, but she knew it would at some later, far more inconvenient time. “I told you the knife was a bad idea.”

“And I told _you_ to hold still.”

Maze procured a lollipop — cherry, its red the same sharp brightness as a fresh cut — from the remains of Trixie’s stash and popped it into her mouth, the stick end undulating slowly as she wrapped her tongue around it.

“How do _you_ get a lollipop and I don’t?” Chloe demanded with narrowed eyes.

Instead of reaching over to rescue another sucker from the pile, Maze pulled her own free from her mouth with deliberate, unblinking indolence, breaking the seal of her lips with a small _pop_. She offered it to Chloe with a wicked glint in her eye, twirling the stick between her fingers so that its cherry head gleamed wetly in the streak of sunlight coming through the blinds. 

“Maze…”

“Fine.” Maze chucked a yellow lollipop into her chest, settling into a mild sulk over being denied her fun.

“Remind me to tell Linda that your bedside manner sucks.”

“Trust me, Linda has _no_ complaints about anything I do in bed,” Maze said with another sly twitch of a smile, delighted that Chloe had fallen into _that_ particular trap of innuendo. “Or beside the bed, or in the kitchen, or in her office…”

“That is so not the same thing, and you know it.”

Maze arched a brow, feigning ignorance. “Isn’t it?”

Chloe was spared from coming up with a response to that by the sudden pulse of a phone — hers, in fact — set to vibrate, and she remembered that she wasn’t supposed to be here at all, much less sitting around sharing suckers and mostly-affectionate insults with her roommate.

“Shit, I need to go.”

She grabbed for her phone (she hardly needed to look at the number to know it was Lucifer, no doubt growing bored in her absence) and groaned again, internally, over the way the entire universe seemed to be working against her ability to present herself as a competent adult. It wasn’t enough that she would be rolling into the precinct at least forty-five minutes late, oh no — she would be doing so in a rumpled suit, thanks to her misadventure with the glass, and with a hand held together by a ridiculous jumble of dinosaurs.

_Keeping it professional as always, Chlo_ , she thought. _Way to go_.

“What am I going to tell them?” she muttered to herself as she levered herself off the sofa (Maze ‘helped’ by unceremoniously tipping Chloe’s legs out of her lap) and set about re-gathering her things, even more flustered than before.

“That we were having some quality girl time and things got a little… rough,” Maze supplied, once again all-too-pleased with the way she could twist even the simplest truths into something sexual.

Chloe stopped to glare at her, and Maze sighed, her face falling into an expression that clearly read _it was a joke_ _, geez, let me live_. She gestured to Chloe’s bandaged palm and general dishevelment. “I’m sure you can invent some suitably heroic explanation for all that.”

Chloe was halfway out the door when, groping in her bag after a set of keys that still wasn’t there, she remembered what had delayed her in the first place. She turned on her heel, bridling with more than annoyance now as she stalked back to confront her roommate — the very roommate who sat waiting for her with a suspiciously casual air of expectation.

“You know, Maze, if you wanted _my_ attention, you didn’t have to steal —”

Maze rose in one sinuous movement, closing the distance between the two of them and quietening her outburst with a well-placed tap to Chloe’s forehead. Before Chloe could sputter at the gesture, Maze chuckled. “Calm down — not everything is a conspiracy against you.” She let her finger trail down to the breast pocket of Chloe’s blazer and fished inside, drawing out the familiar silver of the missing keyring. “I suggest checking _all_ of your pockets next time.”

“Oh.” And now, of course, it was all too easy to recall that she had slipped the keys there for safekeeping last night (it had seemed like a good idea at the time), and she wondered how she had missed the weight of them knocking against her chest. “How… how did you know they were in there?”

“I had the joy of nearly impaling _my_ hand on one of these when I stopped you from completely eating it on the kitchen tile,” Maze said, showing off her own minor wounds as she passed the keys over. “You’re welcome, by the way.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m sure I’ll find a way to thank you later,” Chloe called behind her as she made for the door again, shaking her head in distracted gratitude, and Maze’s answer — brash and binding and anything but virtuous — followed her long after she had pulled away from the house and tried to turn her mind back to the cases she was working.

_I’m counting on it, Decker._

**Author's Note:**

> My take on this prompt for @luciferprompts on tumblr: Chloe has got a splinter stuck in her finger. Maze offers to take it out. Chloe ends up fainting into Maze’s arms. Bonus points if the following line is used: "You know, if you wanted my attention you didn’t have to go to such extremes." 
> 
> Thanks for reading!


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